Expert pinpoints potential Supreme Court plot to sow midterm election chaos

Former U.S. attorney Joyce Vance is sounding the alarm that the threat to mail-in voting this fall does not stop at the White House. In her latest newsletter, the legal analyst argues that even as President Donald Trump pushes an executive order to restrict mail ballots, the Supreme Court may be preparing to throw the nation's election machinery into disarray on its own.

The case Vance flags is Watson, a Mississippi dispute over whether ballots that are mailed by Election Day but arrive afterward can still be counted where state law allows it. A ruling against that practice, she warns, could change the deadline for mail ballots for millions of Americans and upend procedures in more than 30 states. She stresses that this is a separate issue from Trump's executive order, which makes it a second front in the same war over how and when Americans get to vote.

In the piece, Vance argues the court has already shown its willingness to disrupt this cycle. She points to the justices "gutting" the Voting Rights Act in what she calls the "shameful Callais decision," a ruling she says triggered both election-cycle chaos and what she describes as "a race to the bottom in gerrymandering" by greenlighting last-minute redistricting that targets communities of color.

To explain the stakes of the mail-voting fights, Vance turned to her Brennan Center colleague Wendy Weiser, one of the attorneys challenging Trump's order. Weiser lays out a basic constitutional point that runs through both the litigation and the broader concern: the authority to set the rules for federal elections belongs to Congress and the states, not the president. The Constitution likewise gives oversight of the Postal Service to Congress, she notes, which is why an order directing USPS to refuse delivery of valid ballots strikes the challengers as plainly unlawful.

The piece situates the Supreme Court worry inside what Weiser calls a "multipronged, concerted campaign" to undermine the 2026 elections. That campaign, in her account, spans efforts to pressure states over their voter rolls, investigations aimed at voter mobilization groups, and now the regulation of mail voting itself, all of which she says are designed to erode public trust and depress turnout.

Vance does not present the courts purely as a danger, and that is part of why the high court's posture worries her so much. She notes that lower courts have repeatedly blocked the administration, citing eight courts that tossed out Justice Department claims in lawsuits seeking voter rolls, including rulings from judges Trump appointed. The lower judiciary, in other words, has been a reliable check. The open question she raises is whether the Supreme Court will play that same role or instead become another source of the disorder.

Her bottom line is that voters cannot assume any single institution will protect the process for them. Vance urges readers to make a concrete plan to vote, verify their registration, vote early where possible, and resist the conspiracy theories she expects to proliferate. She frames the Watson decision as a looming variable that could reshape the rules mid-cycle, and closes the broader discussion on the warning that, with both the executive branch and potentially the judiciary in play, safeguarding the vote now falls heavily on ordinary citizens.